Introduction to Various Reinforcement Learning Algorithms

Then environment refers to the object that the agent is acting on (e.g. the game itself in the Atari game), while the agent represents the RL algorithm. The environment starts by sending a state to the agent, which then based on its knowledge to take an action in response to that state. After that, the environment send a pair of next state and reward back to the agent. The agent will update its knowledge with the reward returned by the environment to evaluate its last action. The loop keeps going on until the environment sends a terminal state, which ends to episode.